28th October 2009 Archive

The following story was based upon a mistaken assumption that the censorship as described was due to a Turkish governmental directive. That assumption was incorrect. The blockage of the pages discussed was instead merely instituted at a local level - in our reporter's case, through hotel-hosted web access. The Reg page as described below was - and remains - generally accessible throughout Turkey. The Reg regrets the error.

A severe outbreak of the H1N1 pandemic could overwhelm internet providers' capacity, according to a report submitted Monday, which called on Department of Homeland Security officials to develop contingency plans to avert such a crisis.

The European Commission will consider passing new laws forcing organisations that lose personal data to go public with that loss. The Commission has until now been opposed to the creation of wide-ranging data breach notification requirements.

Acer will enter the record books today by releasing the world’s first 3D-capable laptop. So Register Hardware caught-up with the firm behind the technology – Dynamic Digital Depth – to discover how 3D content will look on Acer’s machine.

The former is a bit of a shocker. You'd expect a CTO for one of the most-talked-about startups to want to stick around, but Spotify has lost its tech supremo. But Anderas Ehn, described as the "brains" of Spotify, doesn't seem to think so. He's got a better offer, he wrote yesterday on his Twitter feed.

The increasingly grumpy argument regarding who is allowed to photograph and keep files on whom in this sceptred isle - and who is then allowed to see such files - took a new twist today. It emerged that a person featured on a police headshot gallery of "extremist" arms protesters is actually believed by many activists to have been a spy for the weapons industry.

On Monday, Sony's US optical drive subsidiary said it was being investigated by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in connection with anti-trust activities in the optical drive market. The net has now widened to include Toshiba and Hitachi.

Boffins in California say they have produced music-recommendation software which produces playlists "as good as" those from Apple's iTunes Genius - and which has the advantages of collecting no user data and having in its repertoire a lot of music that "Genius knows nothing about".

Quantum sold $175m of products and services in its second fiscal 2010 quarter, 19 per cent less than a year ago. But CEO Rick Belluzzo is cheerful: his firm made $11m profit, its best performance in five years.

Earlier this week we asked what drives you to refresh or replace your PC and laptop estates and whether your projects involve simply the replacement of existing machines with new hardware and software or if you might be looking at implementing some form of desktop virtualisation. Now in all such refresh projects it is quite usual for the majority of attention to be focussed on acquiring suitable new equipment. The process of what to do with the old kit may only come as an afterthought.

Server and services vendor Unisys has turned in a relatively decent quarter in Q3, thanks to a mainframe upgrade cycle coming at a particularly weak time for the server racket and the ongoing cost cutting manoeuvers from chairman and chief executive officer, Ed Coleman, who was hired last year to turn the company around.

Everyone's favourite advertising company, Google, has today announced the UK roll out of its "PowerMeter" home-electricity-consumption cloud service. The idea is that users of certain home 'leccy meters will for some reason read them via Google's servers, rather than using the online services that come with the meters.

Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has told Democrat San Francisco assembly member Tom Ammiano just what he thinks of him and his "infrastructure financing districts" bill in a letter which explicity slams the latter, while firing a delicious acrostic broadside at its author:

US Air Force boffins say they have created wireless links of similar capacity and quality to optical fibre, allowing extremely high mobile bandwidth and - perhaps - the use of quantum encryption methods without a physical connection.

Intel and chip-tech house Numonyx unveiled a new technology on Wednesday that the companies claim will enable non-volatile memory to break through NAND's 20nm barrier and scale down to process sizes as tiny as 5nm - and do so cost-effectively.

Server and motherboard maker Super Micro is feeling pretty good about its place in the struggling server market, and it continues to see sales rebound as 2009 rolls on. However, profits are a problem still, but the trends are encouraging, according to the company's top brass.